Open letter to the Guild Wars 2 Devs

I posted the text below on the Guild Wars 2 site earlier this evening. I hope that many of you feel the same way and will lend your voice to getting this changed. Happy hunting.

Dear Devs,
I've been a pretty ardent supporter of GW2 from the start. I enjoy the game immensely especially after the changes to dungeons made during the Karka event patch. I've invested a great deal of money in the gem store, mostly with the goal of completing a legendary. I won't state the exact amount here (I imagine the folks on the inside can look it up), but naturally a large portion of that went towards attempting to get a precursor. For the purposes of clarification I am attempting to craft Twilight and have all the of the gifts in my bank.

I realize a lot of folks will say "Oh well why not just save your money and buy it" rather than attempting to craft Dusk in the forge. This is a valid point, however what I have noticed with the precursors that are popular as that even putting real money into the game I was not able to catch up to the increase in price. It steadily rose past the point that I was able to put in enough time and money to catch up. Now this partly because so many other things have to be purchased for the legendary. But in the end I couldn't afford to put enough money and time in to catch up to the price climb on Dusk.

So I'm out, I won't be spending anymore money in the Guild Wars 2 Gem store until Anet changes the method through which you obtain precursors. As a consumer your only power is in purchasing and up to this point I have been a very good consumer for you Anet, but enough is enough. I'm sure you feel that you've more than gotten your money out of me after all you monetized your game so that the purchase price covered your expenses. GW2 is a great game, but it would have been so much better if it had shipped without legendary weapons. You could have added them in a patch later after you developed the method of obtaining them better. With precursors in particular it feels like you simply went for the easiest answer to get them in the game before launch. I was optimistic about GW2 and remain so. But I won't be financially endorsing the game until this issue is fixed.

I encourage others in the community to do the same. I hope this issue is put at the very front of the development teams agenda soon. This is by no means the only problem with game, but it is the one that harms your relationship with your player base the most. We aren't the enemy and neither are you. So please remove the design choices from your game that make many of your players feel like you are stacking the deck against us.

Good Luck and thank you for the wonderful world you've built for us. Tyria has many of the things it needs to be great and I know that many of you on the dev team are making games not because its the most profitable thing you could be doing with your skills but because you love it.

I posted the text below on the Guild Wars 2 site earlier this evening. I hope that many of you feel the same way and will lend your voice to getting this changed.

I think 99% of people looked at the time and effort required to craft a legendary and that it was only a skin and said no thanks even without the ridiculous cost or lottery winning luck required to get a precursor which later became apparent. So no I don't think many care.

I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish with your open letter, other than beating a dead horse and getting the post deleted on the official forums because addressing Anet directly is a big no-no there.

First of all, I agree with all that you wrote and you have my support, since I'm in almost the same situation.
Second of all, I think they will either ban you, delete your post or tell you same bullshit they're telling everyone everytime : it's a skin, so it shouldn't have their full attention (get it if you're lucky, if you exploit enough or if you pay enough or simply screw you), they're working on ideas on how to implement the hunt (which you'll see it whenever it's "ready" - meaning hopefully this year or maybe next year), but not actually working on getting it done since it's not related to the game itself, they know about it (but as usual they're not doing anything about it, just talking about it) and more bla bla bla - concluding to : we know, we don't care / pretend we care by stating we're preoccupied by it. Yeah, right.

I also highly doubt that sinking real cash into the game was a designed way to obtain the legendaries. Whilst the outlet is there, I don't think they expect anyone to spend hundreds(I mean they wish, but they never designed the game as such) in obtaining legendaries.

Regardless, they do hear you folks! Scavenger hunt is a ways off though, because whilst this is a problem, when you say this is the biggest problem that harms the relationship between consumers and Anet, you are wrong.

Focusing and redesigning the current game and all its content so that the game is more enjoyable to play is more important than improving and decreasing the time needed for a legendary. Rather, instead of focusing on an endgame goal to achieve, they need to make the game itself enjoyable to play in the first place.

farm 2-3 weeks and the precursor is yours without single dollar spent in gems. Legendaries are there to prove that your'e real "gamer" , you play much and have no life. If legendaries were easy to obtain , everyone would wear Twilight and Sunrise and thats not cool. You can have max stats items with normal exploring and some farming. If you want elite skins , farm for it. Using real money for a skin that u can obtain with in game items is really sad thing...

The topic this thread covers has been posted about many times. We don't need another thread for an open letter covering the exact same topic of ArenaNet's rather questionable implementation of legendary weapons.

If you want to discuss this topic, without the open letter, feel free to grab one of the older threads or start a new one.